Recently the use of computing clusters and other distributed computing systems has become more popular. Computing clusters and other distributed computing systems have a number of requirements that go well beyond the requirements of stand alone computing systems. Therefore, when products are developed for use in clustered or distributed computing environments, the products typically need to be tested in the environment in which the products are to be deployed. For example, if a software product (such as an application program, a cluster resource or a database) or hardware product (such as a storage device, a processor or an interface card) is developed for use in a computing cluster, it is generally desirable to test the software or hardware product in the cluster environment before releasing such products for sale.
To facilitate the testing of computing cluster related products, test software (e.g., test programs or data service test suites) is typically written that is designed to test the product in an environment similar to the environment in which the product will be used. In the context of clustered computing, this typically requires either that the developer of the test software know a fair amount about the characteristics of the specific cluster in which the product will be deployed, or the engineer running the test to spend a lot of time installing, configuring and/or running the test software in order to execute the desired tests. Consequently, the testing of computing cluster related products is often very expensive and time consuming. Furthermore, in many cases, duplicate work is done since developers and engineers may be unaware of prior tests that have been performed for similar or identical computing cluster environments and products.